I find myself running into a lot of Jim Henson’s work lately.. I was showing my copy of Jim Henson’s designs and doodles to a friend last week, spotted some Muppet dolls in a store (and I haven’t seen Muppet dolls around here in ages!), overheard someone singing "The alligator king", and today I found Nate Pacheco’s blog, which features some old Henson commercials and muppet videos.

After I graduated from college, I tried to find work abroad and sent some CVs, one of them to the Henson Creature shop. I had no experience and obviously got no reply, but when my brother asked me where I sent my CV I told him "To Henson’s creature shop, I hope they will let me come there and become a puppeteer. I’ll settle for assistant puppeteer. I’ll even settle for a job where you just stand there and watch what they do and learn." "Assistant puppeteer, huh?" my brother said "If they ever do answer you, and ask you to come and mop their floors after all the puppeteers are done with their work and gone home, just drop everything you’re doing and go."

They say that part of the genious of Jim Henson was knowing how to see the world at a kid’s eye level. After seeing this video (which I found on YouTube), I think the genious was knowing how to make a puppet see the world at a kid’s eye level. It’s exactly the sort of video that’s going to make me get up tomorrow and try to find out where I can learn puppetry around here.

(The video loads a bit slowly, so if it’s jittery, just click play, then click pause, wait until the bar fills with dark gray, then hit play again)

About the sheep

My name is Ayelet.
I'm a designer, illustrator, mom to baby Toam (born in May 2008), knitter, somewhat-crafty, and mostly trying to figure out how everything fits together.

I try to live ecologically but sensibly. I'll recycle plastic for the rest of my life if you promise to never take away my clothes dryer.

This blog was given to me as a gift from my husband, Ez, on my 27th birthday and I've been using it since then as a sort of think tank/storage space for my thoughts, ideas, illustrations and crafty projects.